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wonder whether this is a good way to discover
France until he announces, 'Hang on, I'm in my
own secret moving garden, where I can stand up
and stare and smell the joys of rural France.'
Subsequently, in the topic of the series, he con-
trasts
Rosa
and her breed with the ubiquitous
and not to be taken seriously fl otillas of fi bre
glass hire craft, which his camera shows to line
the towpaths and clog up the locks, 'On a barge,
you are the correct form of canal transport and
you feel superior to those over-cheerful Noddy-
boaters getting in the way. It's total bliss' (Stein,
2005, pp. 12-13).
The barge becomes a signifi er of taste and
of difference and also a signifi er of an authentic
journey; of continuity between pre-industrial
past and post-industrial present, of a gentler life
attuned to the rhythms of season and land-
scape, of the taste and distinction
9
that mark
out Stein's quest of gastronomic discovery as
being at least fi guratively 'off the beaten track'
(Buzard, 1993) of the hordes of fellow British
holidaymakers who, it is implied, merely skim
the surface of a French canal and its life. Yet
existing in tension with this is the series' gener-
ally unspoken confusion about exactly what
constitutes past and present, what is 'heritage'
and what is the life still lived along the Canal
du Midi. This 'long village'
10
of locals and the
many Anglophone incomers, whom Stein and
his camera seek out for lazy lunches, their call-
ing card his celebrity and television's power to
guarantee an open door, is a World Heritage
Site whose purpose has, as a consequence,
been appropriated and redefi ned. The steel
hulled barges whose authenticity, sanctifi ed by
time and usage and aesthetic, and whose
superiority over the plastic Noddy boats Stein
lauds, are themselves comparative newcomers
to a waterway old enough to have known
wooden hulls and horse traction. Above all is
the paradox that steel, associated with cities
and industrialism, here becomes a symbol if
not of pre-industrialism then of a timeless rural
tradition.
Over two decades earlier, Stein's producer
David Pritchard had, when working with chef
Keith Floyd, established the convention of fi lm-
ing cooking on location. Freeing them from the
constraints and the safety of the studio brought
a new immediacy and a new authenticity to
cookery programmes. Hall
et al
. (2003) draw
parallels with the concept of
goût de terroir
to
suggest that there is a unique combination of
the physical, cultural and natural environment,
which gives each region its distinctive touristic
appeal, its
touristic terroir
.
The French have long used the term
terroir
to
describe the phenomenon of the place
characteristics of food products - a term which
defi es a literal translation into English, but which
is the 'almost mystical' combination of all
aspects of soil, climate and landscape present . . .
(Hall
et al
., 2003, p. 35)
This series' use of 'real' locations as background
to a cookery demonstration offers visual refer-
ences to the touristic and culinary
terroir
of each
recipe and its ingredients, compounded by the
use of the barge to heighten that sense of
terroir
and to underpin and authenticate the sense of a
voyage of culinary discovery. Yet within days, it
became clear that tensions between the televi-
sion chef and
Rosa
's chef meant that the barge's
galley was off limits for fi lming,
11
and Stein was
required to recreate his newly discovered recipes
back home in his own kitchen in Cornwall, or
else to occupy, cuckoo-like, the kitchens of those
whose homes bordered the canal. The galley
had offered little visual potential, with its modern
fi tted units and cramped space, and it was clear
that for the purposes of aesthetic and culinary
authenticity, canal-side homes like that of Amer-
ican food writer Kate Hill offered more.
The name of her house, the
Relais des
Longues Jours
, referred to the carters, the men
who hauled the barges by horse, worked long
days and who moored up at night, stabled the
horses and cooked food in what was then their
rest house.
12
She authenticates it with the words,
9
See Bourdieu (1989) and Palmer (2004).
10
The Canal is so named by American food writer Kate Hill in Episode 2.
11
Rick Stein's French Odyssey
, Episode 2 (August 2005).
12
Rick Stein's French Odyssey
, Episode 4 (September 2005).
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